Boil the Frog Slowly

Most of us have heard the morality tale of the frog that leapt from the boiling pot when tossed in but allowed himself to be placed in a pot of cool water over a stove and boiled slowly to death. Myth or not, it describes the pernicious deceptiveness of apostasy. The unwary, foolish young man mentioned in Proverbs 7 allowed himself to be enticed by a harlot. He did not begin his ultimately fatal odyssey by considering the end of the apostate road he’d chosen (“the chambers of death,” v. 27). But little by little the harlot led him to his spiritual doom:

Immediately he went after her, as an ox goes to the slaughter, Or as a fool to the correction of the stocks, Till an arrow struck his liver. As a bird hastens to the snare, He did not know it [would cost] his life (vv. 22–23)

The same is true of theological apostasy. The theologians and ministers toying with diabolically situated accommodationist doctrines rarely think all the way to the end — when their lives and ministries are destroyed — and when their evil doctrines have ripped the faith from the minds and hearts of young, impressionable students.

When theologians toy with limiting Biblical infallibility to the “core teachings” of the Bible, positing that in historical issues (like the historicity of Adam) it may be in error, they may think they are making the Bible more palatable to modern skeptics (as that prototypical liberal Friedrich Schleiermacher did in On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers), in reality they are only ambling further along the primrose path of apostasy until in the end not even the “core teachings” survive their acidic unbelief. Even if they themselves don’t quite travel to that diabolical destination, their students and church members likely will.

When pastors give up on Christ’s substitutionary atonement because it reflects a God angry at sinful mankind (and, after all, God is all about man’s comfort level, isn’t He?), they will, if consistent, never end with eviscerating the Bible’s incontrovertible teaching about substitutionary atonement. No, they must then tamper with the Fall, with salvation by grace through faith, and with the very character of God. In the end, they serve a new, and false, god. This is the history of Protestant (and post-Vatican II) liberalism. It’s gradually becoming alive and well in evangelicalism.

Accommodationist doctrines (like Biblical errancy, exclusively exemplary views of the atonement, and mythical and non-literal views of creation and Adam and Eve) are simply opening gambits in a protracted game that Satan always wins, concluding in man’s moral destruction.